Anne Landman's Collection
Smoke Without Fear
Abstract
This booklet represents the kind of damaging information that appeared in the lay media in the mid-1950's, courtesy of the tobacco industry and its public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, shortly after the first medical reports emerged saying cigarette smoking caused cancer, emphysema, and heart disease. The author of this piece, Donald Cooley, worked with Hill and Knowlton (H&K) to produce this 48 page, low-priced paperback booklet "published by the editors of True, the Man's Magazine" designed to be sold on newsstands in 1954.
A July 31, 1954 report on activities by H&K states, "Considerable information and assistance was provided Donald G. Cooley in the preparation for his story in True magazine. This entailed conferences with the author to work on factual revisions." http://tobaccodocuments.org/ness/36195.html
User-Contributed Notes
Fields
- Quotes
How This Book Came To Be Written
Along with many other men and women, I became concerned about the possible injurious effect of smokign on my health, after reading various alarmist reports in the newspapers.
So, I asked my doctor if I should quit smoking.
My doctor is a thoughtful man, and after a little deliberation he said:
"I think smoking does you more good than harm, and I wouldn't suggest that you quit."
He went on to tell me that there is a beneficial side of smokign that is provable, while tobacco has not been proven a killer.
Immediately, I wanted to know more about the facts in favor of smoking, so I commissioned Donald G. Cooley, famous writer on medical subjects, to write the factual, honest case for smoking.
Every many and woman who enjoys wmoking should read this book.
Ralph Daigh Editorial Director True - The Men's Magazine
SMOKE WITHOUT FEAR
IF you are a man or woman who smokes, relax and enjoy it. If you have tried to give up smoking a dozen times and failed, quit trying. If you have guilty feelings that you are weak-willed, immoral, and suicidal, begin anew to smoke with peace of mind. Smoke for the pleasure, comfort, relaxation or release you get out of it. Smoking satisfies some inner needs you have. These needs may be unexplainable, unreasonable, preposterous. We may create them ourselves and might be better off without them. However that may be, you continue to smoke because smoking gives you more satisfaction than not smoking. So, if you are a confirmed smoker, smoke without fear. Smoke like Sir James Barrie, who saw Peter Pan in a maze of smoke rings and captured that elfin spirit, to the eternal delight of English-speaking peoples. Sir James wrote thus of the glorious eruption of Elizabethan life: "I know, I feel, that with the introduction of tobacco England woke from a long sleep. Suddenly a new zest had been given to life. The glory of existence became a thing to speak of. Men who had hitherto concerned themselves with the nar row things of home put a pipe in their mouths and became philosophers. Poets and dramatists smoked until all ignoble ideas were driven from them, and into their place rushed such high thoughts as the world had not known before." Advice to smoke without fear may seem wildly irresponsible at the present time when the country is swept by a wave of hysteria about cigarettes. Smoking is said to lead to cancer and heart disease and to cut years off one's life. It is implied that every smoker would live longer if tobacco were to vanish from the earth, taking serious health problems along with it. We have a simple one-way formula for attaining mellow old age: never smoke.
It's hardly that simple. You may be, and should be, suspicious of advice to keep on smoking without constant anxiety. Who says so? Can anything good be said about tobacco? The purpose of this booklet is to examine the smoking question by drawing upon evidence that is widely scattered through the biological sciences. Accumulation of scientific facts is so enormous that no single human mind can grasp more than a fraction of them. Most of the cigarette scare reports are based on analysis or interpretation of statistics or individual experiments. The present booklet is an effort in synthesis--the bringing together of relevant facts that tend to be overlooked by specialists who are superbly competent in their own specialty.
- Company
- Council for Tobacco Research
- Author
- Cooley, Donald G. (True Magazine, Science Writer, Editor, c. 1954)Published booklet, "Smoke without Fear" in True Magazine, 1954
- Recipient
- General public
- Region
- United States
- Type
- PAMPHLET
- Subject
- health belief
- health claim
- mass media
- health claim
Page count mismatch (files 36, split 35)
Document Images
e
How This Book Came To Be Written
ALONG with many other men andd women, I became con-
cerned about the possible injurious effect of smoking on my
health, after reading various alarmist reports in the newspapers.
So, I asked my doctor i f I should quit smoking.
My doctor is a thoughtful man, and after a little delibera-
tion he said:
"I think smoking does you more good than harm, and I
wouldn't suggest that you quit."
He went on to tell me that there is a beneficial side of smok-
ing that is protaable, while tobacco has not been proven a killer.
Inzmediately. I wanted to know more about the arguments
and facts in favor of smoking, so I commissioned Donald G.
Cooley. famous writer on medical subjects, to write the factual.
honest case for smoking.
Every man and woman who enjoys smoking should read
this book.
RALPH DAIGH
Editorial Director
True-The ?l7an's ?llagazine
E;p
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a
0
an average depth of two feet. This would be a
flagrant abuse of statistics and would indubitably
shorten your life expectancy. The example may
sound ridiculous, and indeed it is, but getting the
right answers from statistics is one of the trickiest
enterprises of the human mind. Innumerable
men and women, for instance, believe that if a
tossed coin comes up heads 49 times, "statistics
prove" that the next toss should be tails-yet the
odds are still even.
Parallelism, or the tendency to believe that
one event causes another because the two happen
to occur to about the same degree over the same
time-scale, is another sly statistical joker. There
may possibly be such a cause and effect relation-
ship, but statistics never say so. For instance, con-
\7c
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1
I
sumption of cigarettes in the United States has
increased 456 percent since 1920. Lung cancer
deaths in men have increased 411 percent since
1930. Drawn on a graph, the two lines showing
increase of cigarette smoking and of lung cancer
stay about as close together as railroad tracks and
shoot upward at the same frightening rate.
Therefore, cigarettes must be an inciting cause
of lung cancer.
However, you can make a similar chart show-
ing that the cost of living has increased in about
the same proportion as male lung cancer. A hair-
trigger arguer might assert that four times as
many men now have lung cancer because coffee
costs $1.20 a pound as against 30 cents in 1930.
Or, since incomes rise with living costs, more
5
O
a
C
/
S
These tars are so viscous that they have to be
diluted with acetone, oils, or other solvents, to
make them thin enough for painting on mouse
skin; the mice therefore are exposed to something
else than pure tobacco distillate, and this may or
may not make a difference.
Cautions against drawing extravagant conclu-
sions from mouse-skin data are sounded by sev-
eral scientists 'of the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Jonathan L. Hartwell says, "We do not know
whether man is more or less susceptible than
mice to particular carcinogens. Some animal
species, such as the rat, rabbit and dog, are much
more resistant to certain chemical carcinogens
than is the mouse, and vice versa, while in the
monkey none of the powerful carcinogens has
d;~
been shown to produce tumors." Are we mice or
are we men?
"In the mouse itself," say Drs. Murray J.
Shear and Joseph Leiter, "it is now abundantly
evident that different tissues respond differently
to the same compound. The solvent or vehicle
may affect results profoundly. Moreover, the sex
of the animal is not without influence on the re-
sults. Diet, too, may be an important factor."
A more informative experiment would be to
expose mice to "natural" tobacco smoke, rather
than distilled tars which neither they nor man
are accustomed to inhaling. Such an experiment
has been made on C-57 black mice, more com-
parable with man in their incidence of lung
tumor than some other mouse strains used in
13
had died at the same rate as men who never
smoked. Briefly, this was the bad news for
smokers:
Men who smoked one or more packs of ciga-
rettes a day had about 75 percent higher death
rates than non-smokers.
Men who smoked cigarettes only, regardless
of amount, had 63 percent higher death rates
from all causes, 82 percent higher for heart dis-
ease, 106 percent higher for cancer.
Men who smoked cigarettes and, in addition,
either cigars or pipes or both, had 36 percent
higher death rates from all causes, 56 percent
higher for heart disease, 77 percent higher for
cancer.
Men who smoked either pipe, cigar, or both,
had only 6 percent higher death rates overall,
too small a percentage to be of significance.
In Norway, deaths from heart disease de-
creased to about one-half the "normal" figure
during World War II when cigarettes were al-
most unobtainable during the German occupa-
tion. After the war, when Norwegians could
smoke again, heart disease deaths started to in-
crease again. This is an extremely important
statistic indeed, but it would have been expedient
for those who prepared the report to have omitted
it altogether, for it seriously weakens any open-
and-shut case against smoking as a major cause
of heart disease. Leading authorities on heart dis-
ease are well aware of the significant decrease in
coronary deaths in Norway and some other oc-
cupied countries during the war, but tobacco-
smoking plays no part in the hypotheses they
have arrived at after studying the evidence. No
doubt this is an instance-and not an uncommon
one these day s when scientific facts and theories
accumulate faster than they can be integrated-
of one group of accomplished researchers not
knowing what another group is doing. We will
return to the strange case of the Norwegian
hearts when we discuss smoking and heart dis-
ease more fully.
Almost simultaneously with the Hammond-
Horn report, a similar "forward" statistical
study by Doll and Hill was published in the
British Medical Journal. Subjects were 40,000
English doctors who described their smoking
habits. During a two and a half y ear period, 789
doctors died, 35 of lung cancer, and all were
smokers. Doll and Hill produced a remarkably
precise formula for calculating the life-
shortening effects of cigarettes. They conclude
that among every 1,000 men, 35 years old or
more:
Of those who smoke one cigarette a day (you
call that smoking?) one will die of lung cancer
every two years.
Of those who smoke a pack of cigarettes a
day, three will die of lung cancer every two
years.
Of those who smoke more than a pack a day,
about one will die each year of lung cancer.
What Statistics Do You Read?
The two reports, by Hammond-Horn and by
Doll and Hill, furnish the strongest statistical
evidence yet of an association between smoking
habits and death rates. Hammond and Horn ex-
press the opinion, and frankly label it as an opin-
ion, that the association of higher death rates
with regular cigarette smoking reflects a cause-
and-effect relationship. This is a conclusion,
and certainly a legitimate one, drawn from a
specific set of statistics by highly competent
observers.
It is not a conclusion that statistics "say" for
themselves. Statistics do not say anything. They
merely express mathematical relationships of se-
lected information, usually of limited scope and
of relatively simple nature, that is poured into
the statistical hopper. Since a great deal of the
current furore about cigarette smoking derives
from purely statistical studies, it might be illumi-
nating to have a look at the advantages and short-
comings of the statistical method.
You could drown wading across a river with
4
0
SMOKE WITHOUT FEAR
F you are a man or woman who smokes, re-
I lax and enjoy it.
If you have tried to give up smoking a dozen
times and failed, quit trying.
If y ou have guilty feelings that you are weak-
willed, immoral, and suicidal, begin anew to
smoke with peace of mind. Smoke for the pleas-
ure, comfort, relaxation or release you get out
of it. Smoking satisfies some inner needs y ou
have. These needs may be unexplainable, unrea-
sonable, preposterous. We may create them our-
selves and might be better off without them.
However that may be, you continue to smoke
because smoking gives you more satisfaction
than .not smoking.
So, if you are a confirmed smoker, smoke
without fear. Smoke like Sir James Barrie, who
saw Peter Pan in a maze of smoke rings and
captured that elfin spirit, to the eternal delight
of English-speaking peoples. Sir James wrote
thus of the glorious eruption of Elizabethan life:
"I know, I feel, that with the introduction of to-
bacco England woke from a long sleep. Suddenly
a new zest had been given to life. The glory of
existence became a thing to speak of. Men who
had hitherto concerned themselves with the nar-
row things of home put a pipe in their mouths
and became philosophers. Poets and dramatists
smoked until all ignoble ideas were driven from
them, and into their place rushed such high
thoughts as the world had not known before."
Advice to smoke without fear may seem wildly
irresponsible at the present time when the coun-
try is swept by a wave of hysteria about cigar-
ettes. Smoking is said to lead to cancer and heart
disease and to cut years off one's life. It is im-
plied that every smoker would live longer if
tobacco were to vanish from the earth, taking
serious health problems along with it. We have
a simple one-way formula for attaining mellow
old age: never smoke.
It's hardly that simple. You may be, and
should be, suspicious of advice to keep on smok-
ing wzthout constant anxiety. Who says so? Can
anything good be said about tobacco? The pur-
pose of this booklet is to examine the smoking
question by drawing upon evidence that is
widely scattered through the biological sciences.
Accumulation of scientific facts is so enormous
that no single human mind can grasp more than
a fraction of them. Most of the cigarette scare-
reports are based on analysis or interpretation'of
statistics or individual experiments. The present
booklet is an effort in synthesis-the bringing to-
gether of relevant facts that tend to be overlooked
by specialists who are superbly competent in
their own specialty.
We can't tell all the facts, any more than scare-
stories can, for the reason that nobody knows all
the facts about anything, the preponderance of
scientific ignorance over scientific knowledge
being what it is. But it is possible to bring the
BY DONALD G. COOLEY
SSfOKE (~iTTfiOUT FEAPt La publlehed b, TptVE ma~asln. anQ FaweetL Fubllptlo~ns, Ine., FawV61..
laee, Greenwfeh, Conn. EAftorfal o.~cw' aY
67 ~ties6 ~ath Street, New York 36. N. Y. Tradenurk o! Fawcett Publioatioao. iLe. CoDYTf~hY 18wcott
Publlcatlons, Iua. Priatsd fn U.9.A.
1
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says: "The recent ability to diagnose lung cancer
plus the fact that it occurs only in older age
groups, which have increased tremendously dur-
ing the past two decades, seems sufficient to ex-
plain the increased incidence in the disease."
Other experts, equally skeptical, cite evidence
along these general lines:
Lung cancer mainly strikes men who have
passed the 50-year mark. Lung cancer incidence
reaches its peak among men aged 65-69 years.
This coincides pretty closely with the end of cur-
rent life expectancy-the time when you're sta-
tistically expected to die of something. (&ut
remember, mass statistics say nothing whatever
about you personally.) We now have four times
as many people, 65 or older, as in 1900.
Nobody really knows for certain how preva-
I
lent lung cancer was before 1930. Reliable
methods of detecting and diagnosing lung cancer
in living patients have all been developed in the
past 25 years. Ability of surgeons to invade the
chest with safety is relatively recent.
Men died of chest diseases in 1900 in far
greater numbers than at present. Fifty years ago,
27 percent of male deaths were classified as in-
fectious diseases of the respiratory sy stem. By
1950, largely due to sulfas and antibiotics, only
6 percent of male deaths were charged to infec-
tions involving the chest. About one-fifth of the
men who would have died of diseases of the lungs
(according to 1900 death-cause expectancies)
stayed alive to die of other diseases. Since man
is mortal, reducing one cause of death results in
a rise of other causes.
COIPa mr huaband. He likes big ash trays."
9
gests to Dr. Hueper of the National Cancer Insti-
tute that smoking must be of very minor
influence in causing lung cancer, if it has such
an effect at all.
Tobacco smoke, in whatever form, first enters
the mouth and nasal passages and larynx before
it reaches the lungs. It is hotter, more concen-
trated in those areas. Yet there has been no in-
crease in cancer of the larynx or mouth. Those
who incriminate the cigarette are prone to say
that there has been a wildfire increase in cancer
of the lung in males, but no significant increase
in any other kinds of cancer. They are not aware
of, or choose to ignore, a comparable increase in
leukemia, often called cancer of the blood. In
commenting upon the great increase of leukemia,
comparable to the increase in cancer of the lung,
Dr. William Dameshek, noted Boston hematolo-
gist, speculates that the disease may be induced
by many hazards of environment to which we
are exposed today. But he doesn't mention smok-
ing among these.
Alarmists would be ecstatic, and smokers
would be miserable, if anybody succeeded in
identifying a carcinogen in tobacco or its smoke.
A carcinogen, in the biological trades, is any sub-
stance that incites or induces cancer.
The Mouse-skin Experiments
No substance of this sort has as yet been chem-
ically identified. It isn't for lack of trying, either.
Among those who have been hunting it fre-
netically are technicians of the tobacco industry,
who would love to pounce on a tobacco carcino-
gen-if such a thing actually exists-so they
could filter it out and enable the advertising de-
partment to proclaim "our cigarettes are posi-
tively noncancerigenic." Innumerable other
researchers, outside the industry, are industri-
ously seeking a carcinogen because it is desper-
ately needed to prove the case against smoking,
which is uncomfortably flimsy if left to rest on
statistical evidence alone.
Biological evidence is desirable, and in fact is
indispensable, if smoking is to be held guilty as
charged. Most of the evidence thus far comes
from mouse skins. Over a period of many years,
numerous investigators have painted the backs
of mice with tars distilled from tobacco smoke, to
see if skin cancer could be induced. Most early
experiments of this nature were discontinued as
failures. An occasional skin cancer appeared, at-
tributed as much to old age as to tar-painting by
some workers.
The most impressive mouse-skin experiments
to date have been reported by Dr. Evarts A.
Graham and Dr. E. L. Wynder. Victims were 81
mice of an inbred strain which does not develop
spontaneous skin cancers. The mice were ob-
tained from the famous Roscoe B. Jackson Me-
morial Laboratory, headed by Dr. Clarence C.
Little, noted researcher in cancer genetics who
currently is director of the Tobacco Industries
Research CounciL
Smoke from burning cigarettes was condensed
to a thick tar, thinned with acetone so it could
be painted on the mice's skins. After an average
of 71 weeks of tar-painting (equivalent to 30 to
50 years of human smoking, Dr. Graham esti-
mates) 36 of the mice developed skin cancers.
The sex-ratio completely reversed the statistical
association of smoking and lung cancer in men
and women. Of the affected mice, 25 were fe-
males and 11 males. The rest of the mice that
were insulted with tar refused to produce can-
cers.
The mice that did develop skin cancer had
epidermoid types, not unexpectedly since skin is
rich with that variety of cells. The most wide-
spread type of male lung cancer is epidermoid,
and lung tissue may be regarded as a kind of
skin tissue folded inside the body instead of out-
side. So the findings had some relevance to male
lung cancer. But this evidence is too inconclusive
to satisfy everybody on either the pro or con side
of the cigarette controversy. Human beings get
tobacco smoke into their lungs, but they do not
inhale thick, concentrated, gummy tobacco tars.
12
i
calories than fat foods. Most Norwegians couldn't
get enough fatty foods to sustain excess blubber
on their frames. Perforce, they lost excess body
fat. And took a load off their hearts. And didn't
die off from heart disease as fast as they'd been
dying when they ate all they wanted.
This association of fat, diet, overweight, with
heart disease is generally accepted by nutrition-
ists as a very satisfying explanation of a wartime
decline in Norwegian heart deaths. The nutri-
tionists didn't give a thought to cigarette con-
sumption, which declined coincidentally. Of
course, like the smoking statisticians, the nutri-
tionists may have overlooked something that a
different set of statistics could throw some light
on. For instance, soaps are made from fats, and
soap was also scarce during the German occupa-
tion. Perhaps Norwegians had quit bathing,
thereby retaining sediments, grime, salts and
detritus which sealed the skin and prevented
body fluids and nutrients, possibly beneficial to
the heart, from evaporating wastefully from
their skin.
But the nutritionists seem to be dealing with
something tremendously important, in focusing
on the metabolism of fats. Statistical associations
of fat and overweight with heart disease are even
more devastating than statistical associations of
smoking and heart disease.
Let's put two respectable sets of heart disease
statistics side by side and see how they mesh.
One set is provided by the famous Hammond-
Horn study, the other by statisticians of the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Life in-
surance companies don't charge higher pre-
miums for men who smoke. This is a hard-headed
actuarial "no" answer to the question, "Does
smoking shorten human life?" Naturally, life
insurance companies want to keep their cus-
"Dam' rain:'
21
smoking investigations. Dr. Russell W. Weller
of Hahnemann Hospital, Philadelphia, reported
some results of the study to the same convention
of the American Medical Association at which
Hammond and Horn read the American Cancer
Society report.
The mice were regularly exposed to measured
amounts of ordinary tobacco smoke, beginning
at the age of mouse "adolescence" and continu-
ing up to natural death. At the same time, equal
numbers of mice, used as controls, were kept
from all contact with tobacco smoke but other-
wise lived the same lives as their smoked breth-
ren. When a smoked mouse died, an unsmoked
one was killed, and vice versa, and microscopic
autopsies were performed.
Out of a group of 132 mice, one lung cancer
developed. It occurred in a mouse exposed to to-
bacco smoke. One primary lung tumor in a group
of 132 mice was regarded as falling within the
normal range of statistical expectancy.and there-
fore to be of little significance. What was impor-
tant, in Dr. Weller's opinion, was the complete
absence of any significant increase in lung can-
cer in mice heavily exposed to tobacco smoke
from adolescence to old age.
Spotlight on Cigarette Paper
"This is indeed contrary to most of the recent
reports dealing with the effects of cigarette smoke
exposure in animals," Dr. Weller stated. The
reasons for the difference, he believes, is that
most investigations reporting a high incidence of
lung tumors have used animals having a much
higher natural occurrence of lung cancer than
C-57 mice, and that concentrated distillation
products rather than natural smoke have been
used.
If no carcinogen has been identified in tobacco,
might one not be present in some product used
with tobacco-cigarette paper, maybe? Don't
think they haven't thought of that!
Thomas A. Edison was violently opposed to
cigarettes. He wouldn't knowingly hire a ciga-
rette smoker. He believed that cigarettes made
the human brain fall apart. You might think that
Edison was opposed to smoking. Not at all-just
to cigarettes. He was a cigar smoker. When his
desk was opened on the occasion of his hundredth
birthday anniversay, out rolled a generous sup-
ply of cigars and a man-size chunk of cut plug.
Edison believed that cigarette paper was evil.
R. B. Tennant, in his monograph, The American
Cigarette Industry, quotes Edison as writing thus
to Henry Ford in 1914:
"The injurious agent in cigarettes comes prin-
cipally from the burning paper wrapper. The
substance thereby formed is called acrolein. It
has a violent action in the nerve centers, pro-
ducing degeneration of the cells of the brain,
which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most
narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and
uncontrollable."
Edison spread a good deal of light in the world,
but not on this subject. Acrolein is not a narcotic,
nor is it produced principally by burning paper.
Rather, it is created by the combustion of fatty
substances, such as glycerols commonly added to
tobacco products to retain moisture. It is rather
irritating to mucous membranes, but nobody be-
lieves any more that it burns holes in human
brain cells.
Edison shared a fairly common belief of his
time that cigarette paper was rankly poisonous.
The idea, which has astounding longevity, may
have been abetted if not initiated by disgruntled
cigar-makers who didn't relish the competition
of new-fangled cigarettes. In any event, widely
believed rumors held that cigarette paper was
bleached with arsenic and white lead, and, in-
evitably, finished off with a soupcon of opium
or morphine.
Cigarette paper is not made from rice, as
many believe, but from flax fibers, left over
after linseed oil is expressed. Some chalk is used
too (calcium carbonate). Burning speed is con-
trolled by the porosity of the paper-the denser,
the more slowly it burns. And that's all there is
14
cer. But in Turkey the male-to-female lung can-
cer ratio has not evened up. It has increased from
6 to 1 for males in 1935 to 8 to 1 in 1950.
Dr. William F. Rienhoff, Jr., pioneer lung sur-
geon of Johns Hopkins University, is one expert
who thinks sex needs more looking into, speaking
of lung cancer. "At the present time, women are
smoking almost as much as men and there has
not been a proportionate increase of cancer of
the lung in women," he observes. "Just as in can-
cer of other organs, there must be a sex tendency.
For instance, cancer of the breast is very infre-
quent in men and more frequent, as everybody
knows, in women."
Can sex hormones have some influence on can-
cer, as well as other things you can think of?
They certainly can-not only on cancer but on
heart disease. The general class of chemicals
(sterols) to which the sex hormones belong is
today the subject of intensive medical research
into fundamental mechanisms of degenerative
diseases-one of the brightest, most exciting,
filled-with-promise areas of modern research,
but completely nonexistent as far as sweeping
statistical scares about smoking are concerned.
We'll tell you some more about hormones when
we talk about your heart.
You rarely see a woman any more who's biting
a pipestem or chewing a stogie. Cigarettes are
pre-eminently the smoke of females. By rights,
the ladies ought to be expiring in droves from
lung cancer, if current scare stories which lam-
baste the cigarette as the principal tobacco-cause
factor of the disease have any basis in fact.
Cigars and Pipes Seem to be Harmless
Cigars and pipes come out of the present
smoke-scare with a strangely clean bill of health.
Surprisingly clean, if not absolutely so. They
may be noxious but innocuous. And, as the man
said when he found a square egg in a hen's nest,
that's a curious situation. For on the whole, pipe
and cigar smokers burn up as much tobacco; and
•often,.more, than cigarette smokers.- If 'tobacco
induces cancer, why aren't a proper number of
pipe and cigar smokers losing their lungs?
There may be unknown errors that distort
statistics which are kinder to cigars and pipes
than cigarettes, but statistics are the main props
of present smoking anxieties and here's what
they're made to say: Hammond and Horn con-
clude that "The death rate of regular cigar
smokers was slightly higher than the non-
smokers but the data were not statistically sig-
nificant, and the death rate of pipe-smokers was
not appreciably different from the non-smokers."
In the same study, over-all deaths of men who
smoked cigarettes only were 63 percent above
the expected deaths. Men who smoked cigarettes
but also hit the pipe or puffed cigars or both had
only 36 percent higher death rates. Obviously,
the thing to do is to smoke tobacco in all available
forms-cigarettes, pipe, cigars-thereby reduc-
ing your chances of premature demise by about
one-half. You can even assert that "statistics
prove it," if you haven't come by now to look
for hidden meanings in statistics.
Doll and Hill concluded from their extensive
British statistics that "it certainly appears that
the risks are less in pipe smokers." Data collected
in a New York state study by Drs. Levin, Gold-
stein and Gerhardt, indicate that pipe and cigar
smokers have no higher incidence of lung cancer
than non-smokers. Most other studies, though
not all, are of similar tenor.
Why are cigarettes more dangerous, if they
are dangerous? Well, most cigarette smokers in-
hale. Smoke bathes their lungs in greater con-
centrations. Pipe and cigar smoke is not
commonly inhaled. All studies of environmental
cancer agree that cancer incidence increases di-
rectly with intensity and duration of exposure
to cancer-inducing substances. But the inhaling
theory doesn't survive analysis, at least by Doll
and Hill. In their famous British study, they con-
cluded that inhaling (contrasted with smoking'
but not inhaling) did not seem to influence the
likelihood of- acquiring. lung cancer. This.-sug-'
11
